34 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
34 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
cracker
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n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in
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defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier
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attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was
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largely a failure. Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion
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against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism
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cracker in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term
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safe-cracker as by the non-jargon term cracker , which in Middle English
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meant an obnoxious person (e.g., What cracker is this same that deafs our
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ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath? Shakespeare's King John,
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Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a
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barely gentler synonym for white trash. While it is expected that any real
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hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic
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techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire
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to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if
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it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
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Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the
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mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers
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tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little
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overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though
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crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers
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consider them a separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders
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to spot the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that
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conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms
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de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather than
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concealment. Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who
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can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than
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breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons
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crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on cracking and
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phreaking. See also samurai , dark-side hacker , and hacker ethic. For a
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portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
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